I'd add that this approach has two benefits.
1) You can fill your resume with applicable experience, and be able to answer the question "What were you doing the last six months?"
2) Meeting and working with other software engineers can make a big difference in finding a good job. It's not what you know, it's who you know (and what they think of you).

What's the difference?

Exactly, this is BS, IQ is a measure of how well someone learns, not how much they know. Full disclosure: I failed miserably.

They must be driven to the Hive mind of /.

Ironically, the people I know that like it most hate facebook, and consequently aren't used to using social media (myself included).

You might see the warned car beeping, but it might just do things you won't notice.

For example, in that two seconds where it thinks there might be a problem, it could increase the gain on the brakes, and reduce the gain on acceleration. So if you are accelerating towards a stopping vehicle, it will not accelerate as fast, and if you start to brake, it could brake harder. Alternatively, there could be subtle gains to be had as well. In a hybrid vehicle, it might prepare to regenerate the batteries, or if you are in cruise control it could change the speed. There are a lot of complicated things happening under the hood of a modern automobile, and you'd be surprised how little it could take in a lot of cases to reduce fatalities.

Both the examples of less stress involved the mice being less fearful. Wouldn't that make sense, in an evolution sense for the bacteria? Mice with less fear get eaten, by something that will then host the bacteria that reduce fear in their host, so that host will get eaten...

What's next? A Twisted Transistor?

My common sense would say that if the user already gave up control of their PC to the botnet, why should they have any say in keeping the feds from removing the bot? The reason the feds are interesting is (I'm assuming) because the botnet caused harm to others. Just remove the bot, if there are consequences, and they know what they are, then it's their own fault.

But, the federal government is held to a higher standard aren't they?

I use a hammer and nail...

They are worried about their information escaping, and their network being compromised. If you put the server somewhere else (or use a google calendar or similar), you would not need the network security hole, and you can access it from anywhere (iPhone, hospital computer, etc.) You just have to make sure no proprietary or confidential information ends up in that calendar.

That's not quite the 1.21 GW needed...

I think they got it backwards, keeping a plant alive is only possible by people who are productive (hence my plant died, and I am posting to slashdot...)

You mean PirateGarage.com?

Well, manufacturers often use screws to secure their IP inside the box you just bought. If you can manage to decrypt that security (I would suggest a brute force method, starting with lefty-loosy) then you are just going to get slapped with a DCMA lawsuit. That's why we really should just take our cars to the dealer to get our oil changed. If you do it yourself, you are just asking for trouble.